


street lamps look like headlights coming closer to this home

by cicadas



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen, a snippet of nancy's thoughts, barb has been missing for over a week, setting: early S1, so slight canon divergence.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-22
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-25 10:53:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20723024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicadas/pseuds/cicadas
Summary: Nancy takes down the pictures after the first week.





	street lamps look like headlights coming closer to this home

**Author's Note:**

> canon divergence: timeline extension

She can't stand to look at them.

It's been a week, and Barb hasn't shown up at school, or her house, or the public library or even the grocery store. She watches the door of every place she's in, waiting to see red hair and a high-waisted outfit come in, ring the bell, alert her that her friend is here. She hasn't gone anywhere, she's fine, and they're going to spend hours on the phone to continue whatever conversation they leave each other on. Like always. They've never said goodbyes.

Nancy rubs her chin where its been resting on the windowsill and wonders when it got so dark. Barb has a car, so she'd see the headlights anyway. She keeps the curtains drawn just in case she pulls up in the middle of the night and needs to be let in. They could make tea and sandwiches quietly and maybe have a cry about whatever it was keeping her away so long without calling. She knows it wasn't a fight with her mom, because Mrs. Holland didn't seem regretful on the phone, but who knows. It's not like she's going to tell Nancy that out of the blue, unless she thought sonething was wrong. Which it isn't. She's somewhere, and she's probably working some stuff out and needs time and that's why she hasn't called.

Except that's bullshit, because that's not Barb. And so Nancy takes down the pictures she has of her best friend, unpinning them from her corkboard with very careful fingers, and places them in her bedside drawer. She'll put them back up soon. She just can't stand to look at them right now.

At school, the teachers ask her if they've heard anything. Nancy shakes her head, smiles, and keeps it up when they give her the sympathetic looks all teachers are trained to give. The same words, the same pout and head tilt, the same way. She wonders if its part of the job - having to pretend to care about every single one of their students. It's mean, not like her to be thinking this way, but she doesn't have the heart for sympathy. She wants action. She wants a search party like they did for Mike's friend. She wants worry. She wants people to care.

In her drawer at home, Barb smiles up at the wood of her drawer, frozen in Kodak. Her features are flattened on print paper, forever in a photo booth from last year's fourth of July fair, Nancy's arms wrapped around her shoulders. When she gets home, Nancy moves the pictures to a box in her closet and calls Mrs. Holland for the second time that day. Still nothing. Still no call, still no updates from her visit to the station. _Everyone's caught up with this young boy, it seems, Nancy. Barbara's sixteen now; she's not as vulnerable as a little girl, but she is one. She's my little girl, and I want her home. You tell her that, if she calls you. You'll tell me if she calls you, won't you?_

Somehow she always ends up reassuring when she seeks reassurance. Calming others down when she needs to scream. Telling everybody its fine, whatever it is, its fine, when nothing lately has been fine. She doesn't hold a grudge against it. It comes with being an older sister. She is reliable and smart and a good example. Clean and well dressed with nice friends and full length skirts, and she's never tried a cigarette or anything harder than beer and has never slept in when she was up late the night before. Revising and revising and revising. She rewrites her flashcards several times to make sure her handwriting is neat and there are no ink smudges. She's a good student and a good daughter and in her head, yes, she's a good sister. She knows she's a good friend.

So why hasn't Barb called?

It's been a week, and nobody seems to care that a classmate - student, neighbour, _person_ \- is missing. She isn't selfish for wanting just a portion of the attention drawn away from the Byers boy onto the only person she's felt connected to since she was thirteen. Her best friend in the entire world of the small town she lives in, and will probably always live in if she doesn't get to see her again and plan their massive, outlandish road trip. She isn't selfish for wanting people to recognise that there are two people missing in Hawkins, and they can't just brush off Barbara because she's a teenager and things like running away and stupid decisions are synonymous with her age.

She's not any more selfish for wanting these things than Mrs. Byers is for hounding the front door of the police station each morning, chain smoking cigarettes while she waits for it to open. No more than Mrs. Holland for calling each afternoon. No more than Mike for lying, skipping school, sneaking out.

If anything, Barb is the selfish one for being missing. For making her worry until she feels like she can't keep dinner down because her stomach is twisting so badly, heat-packs pressed to her abdomen and eyes trained on the window. Listening out for the bell to chime at the general store. A knock on her front door. The squeak of breaks and tires pulling into the driveway. Barb hasn't done any of these things - these tiny little things that would be so painless to do - because she's Missing. And that word is a tangible thing the more she thinks it, so Nancy closes the door to her closet, locking Barb inside, and draws her curtains.

It means she won't wake up if a car pulls up in the middle of the night, but she doesn't care. She can have one moment of selfishness. Barb is having hers right now, and she isn't even around to see all the turmoil she's causing to the select few she knows. Part of Nancy wishes she were just so she could tell her: _see? People do care. You're not that much of an outcast that you're despised. You're not unimportant because you don't fit in. I wasn't lying when I said I cared when you asked me in June, when we had that huge fight. Do you remember that? You were so upset for no reason but I didn't leave when you told me to go._

_Why did_ _you?_ Nancy screams. _Why did you leave?_

She screams inside her head, because it's late. If she wakes anybody up, she'll have to come up with an explanation and she doesn't want to. The constant acting concerned when appropriate and considerate when needed and compassionate always is stretching thinner and thinner over days that are getting longer by the hour. Nancy pulls her pillow to her chest, her face to her pillow, and breathes deep.

_Where did you go? What happened? Why did you leave? Why did you leave without me?_

It's only been a week and Nancy can't stand to look at Barbara's picture. If it turns out they're the only way she's ever going to be able to see her friend again, she doesn't want to look at them. Ever. They'll stay tucked in that box, gathering dust in her closet, among shoes and spare handbags. They can stay there for as long as it takes for someone to do something about all the bad shit that's been happening that's dragged her best friend along inside it.

Part of her hates Barb for leaving, but the larger part - the one that has her filling up those heat packs and picking at her nails and winding and unwinding the phone cable until kinks form in the spiral - knows she didn't go anywhere. She was taken. She doesn't give a shit what the police say, or what people think, or what they've been saying when they think she can't hear and interject. Barb is a person. Living and breathing, with a wonderful laugh and a wicked smart mind, who is amazing at song trivia despite her occasionally questionable music taste, who passed her driving test on the first try even though she was nervous. She isn't a moody teen, she isn't a runaway, and she isn't a flat, lifeless photograph.

She's her best friend. Her only real friend. And she's missing. The copies she has of Barbara's big cheeked smile remain tucked in the closet where they don't belong.

All she wants is to see her face, but she can't stand to look at it.

Nancy gets up in the middle of the night to pull the curtains wide open. In the blur of the sleep-wake inbetween, she thinks she sees one of the street lamps moving, like its driving closer to the house. She pries her eyes open wider, forcing them to focus, but all she can see is the dark street and the closest street light burning a soft glow into her eyes. Nancy turns from the window with that twisting, stinging feeling starting to form in her abdomen, and crawls back into bed. She has a physics quiz in the morning.


End file.
